Chinese-English Translation · Composition

Edit (2018/06/15): I’ve now de-listed this video from YouTube because I now realise the mixing is… not up to standard. There’s no compression and no EQing, and the orchestra swell is too much at the end. It’s something I might re-visit in the distant future, though.

Anyway, I re-imagined the theme for Blackthorn City/Azelea Town as a swing piece. You can hear most of a big band, and an array of strings, with a flute as the main instrument.

This piece was originally in Db, but I transposed it down a semitone because… who loves all those flats, right? The other reason is that otherwise there are several long notes that would be on a Db, which on a flute tend to sound very weak (although there are ways of improving it).

The second half of the song enters in the relative minor, but with virtually the same melody. This is a fun way of adding variety to songs which have a short loop time, like pretty much everything from the early Pokémon games. I’ve done this a few times – check out this and this to see how it works in other pieces of music.

I added an extra 16-bar section starting at bar 42 for additional variety; the harmony re-iterations the descending chromatic found earlier in the piece.

This is my first time recording instruments using Logic, and (unsurprisingly) it took a lot of takes. I can still hear a few notes that are just a little bit off, but this is the best I can do for now.